Posted on 08/16/2007 3:06:06 PM PDT by abt87
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. ADVERTISEMENT
An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday — and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.
The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.
The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry's recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Hey...right there with you. Think of the folks alive right now, working next to you, that have never seen a rotary phone...
True. If that were the case, then Napster and the p2p programs would never have taken off, and we’d be talking about DVD-Audio players being the portable music device of choice instead of the iPod.
Ha ha ha I remember those.
I just knew the game Afterlife would hauint me someday:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife_(computer_game)#Bad_Things
I heard he works at a nuclear power plant.
They’re DVD drives because computers store their data on drives, drives of various formats and media. Harddrives, floppy drives, tape drives, thumb drives, CD drives and DVD drives.
In theory, unless you got one of the cheapest DVD drives in the history of ever, your DVD drive can access all the shiny disks, data CDs, data DVDs, music and video CDs, and music and video DVDs. Reading and (if it’s a writing drive) writing as appropriate.
As for file formatting nothing innate about the drive will change that, there are software tools that will let you turn an AVI into the DVD format which you could then burn onto a DVD and have a DVD movie. But if you chose not to use that software and burned that AVI onto the DVD you’d just have a data DVD with an AVI on it.
I’m with you, those formats didn’t take off because the discs themselves were expensive, they needed expensive equipment to play them, more expensive equipment to process that outbound signal with enough fidelity for a serious audiophile to tell the difference, and a serious audiophile to tell the difference. Most music purchases are destined to be background music people have on while driving, working, exercising or otherwise not paying rapt attention to the music. Which really aren’t circumstances that inspire people to drop a lot of money on equipment and media.
but surely you could tell the difference between 2 speakers and surround sound? That’s what I want: to hear classical music in surround sound
Never should’ve sold by vinyl collection. Vinyl recorded onto reel-to-reel or a high quality cassette deck sounds (to my ears) far superior to digital. Can listen for hours on end. Digital, otoh, get irksome after less than an hour of listening. Don’t know exactly why.
Don’t think of DVDs as just things that have movies on them. DVD stands for Digital Versatile Disc — not Digital Video Disc. It can store any kind of data.
Your “DVD drive” is probably actually a DVD writer. (Either that or it’s a DVD-ROM drive, which can only READ DVD discs but not CREATE them, since ROM stands for Read Only Memory. But I’m betting that you have a DVD Writer, since you say you just got these computers. DVD Writers are standard issue now.)
Anyway — Your DVD Writer can play DVD movie discs, sure. But it can also:
1. Read DVDs that have other data on them, like software programs that are packaged on DVD discs.
2. Write DVDs to DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW or DVD+RW discs. (And sometimes, depending on the writer, to DVD-RAM format discs, although those are out of favor now.)
I usually stick with either DVD+R or DVD-R formats for blank DVD discs. What’s the difference between +R and -R? There are tech differences, but none that you really have to worry about. Each stores about 4.7 GB of data.
DVD+R and DVD-R format discs are “write-once” discs. That means that once you write (aka “burn”) information onto them, that’s it. It’s permanent. You can’t erase the information and write again.
The +RW and -RW discs, on the other hand, are ReWriteable discs. You can burn to them, then reformat and use them again. Again, there’s no practical difference between +RW and -RW formats, for most people.
There are also double-density (DL) DVD+R discs that are available. These store about twice as much data as regular DVD+R discs. Nearly all commercial movie DVDs are written on double-density DVD discs. Your DVD writer should be able to handle reading and writing these discs also.
3. In addition to reading and writing DVDs, your drive can also read and write CDs — both audio ones and data ones. You buy blank CD-R discs for that. They store about 700MB each.
In order to “copy” an AVI file to a DVD disc, you need to have a DVD authoring program. I use Adobe Premiere Elements or just Windows Movie Maker (limited but easy), to edit my videos, then Nero Vision to author to DVD. Authoring a DVD involves adding the video (AVI, MPG, etc.) files, creating the DVD’s main menu, and so on. I’m not entirely happy with the tools I have — I’m sure people can recommend some better ones out there — but mine work OK.
So, there’s a difference between just copying an AVI file to a DVD+R blank disc, and actually creating a movie DVD. I just explained the latter. If you simply did the former — just used a DVD burning program like Nero and burned the AVI file onto a DVD data disc — well, you’d have a nice backup of your AVI file, but that’s it. You wouldn’t be able to stick it into a DVD player and play it. You need to author a DVD video disc, as I mentioned, to accomplish that.
Hope this helps and didn’t confuse you further....
I’m sorry about your mom. Yeah, mid-forties is still young.
Thankfully due to the ripping capabilities of CDs my music collection is 99.9% complete...at almost 5,000 songs (mostly from the 50's and 60's).
he first cd I saw was when my roomate in probably ‘86 bought a CD. I was afraid to touch it at first. My first CD was The Hooters.
Actually, they already have “iTunes Plus” which offers DRM-free AAC tracks encoded at 256k. So far, I believe only EMI has signed up.
The iTunes Plus tracks are $1.29 a song. Too much! I won’t be supporting that.
Here is an intriguing quote from Nobuyuki Idei, Sony Chairman, circa 2003:
“The music industry has been spoiled. They have controlled the distribution of music by producing CDs, and thereby have also protected their profits. So they have resisted Internet distribution. Six years ago I asked Sony Music to start working with IBM to figure out how to offer secured distribution of their content over the Net. But nobody in Sony Music would listen. Then about six months ago, they started to panic. They have to change their mindset away from selling albums, and think about selling singles over the Internet for as cheap as possible-even 20 cents or 10 cents-and encourage file-sharing so they can also get micro-payments for these files. The music industry has to re-invent itself; we can no longer control distribution the way we used to. Most entertainment executives understand this, but how to exactly execute on this model is more difficult.”
I’m still waiting for the music industry (and Sony Music itself, for that matter) to take this guy’s advice. Ironically, two years after this statement was made, Sony Music ended up being the XCP rootkit malware scandal company. Darn shame.
;-)
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